Monday, August 20, 2007

I-PORT, take 6

I've been forgetting to try the Ports.
On Friday afternoon, my mother put the 6th one into my left thigh. I did not use skin prep; I took a bath and then a shower to get clean beforehand. It hurt going in and the initial pain wore off in minutes.
The area remained slightly sore for the entire time that I wore it, but it didn't get really bad. Needles didn't hurt going into the port, but about half of the shots had a sting when the insulin went in, with more sting towards the end. I only injected Novolog into the port, and I put about 20 shots into it.
I removed it this morning after breakfast. The breakfast Novolog shot had stung. It was 8 units, and the last four stung a lot more, but it was still less painfull than most of my injections. The area under the adhesive was only slighly red, but the inner area had swollen and there was a semicircular bruise that was slightly swollen. The cannula was at a 70 degree angle from the port (it goes in at a 90 degree angle), and had a small amount of pus and blood inside. There was a small amount of blood (three large drops) from the site.
My blood sugar ran fairly decently during this time, with the highs being attributable to Lantus problems.

In other news, it appears that my fatigue isn't a direct cause of blood sugars! Yes! It seems that I might have hepatitis A, which is absolutely wonderful because guess what? Hepatitis A should be GONE in just a couple of months. Which is longer than colds take, true, but way shorter than the expected duration of diabetes. The fatigue will be gone, did you read that? I'm happy.
I don't actually know that I have hep A; somebody very close to me found in a routine doctor visit that xe has some liver problem and was tested for hep A and will get the results back today; but I have every single symptom of phase 2 hep A. I've been vaccinated against hep B. Phase 2 hep A symptoms that I have include anorexia (meaning lack of appetite, not anorexia nervosa), nausea, joint pain, itchiness, fatigue. I'm also glad that if I have hep A, I probably don't have arthritis :-) I was pretty worried about it.
Hep A is very rarely fatal in people whose immune systems haven't been severely compromised (diabetes is not severely compromised). Severity of symptoms ranges from none to extreme fatigue. By the time you're where I'm at, you can treat the symptoms but otherwise you can't treat it. Like chickenpoz, having it once confers lifelong immunity. Althought it is sometimes classified as an STD, it is usually gotten other ways, such as working with small kids who aren't totally toilet trained (person close to me is a family member, not a significant other).
Peace out,
Jonah

2 comments:

manny hernandez said...

Jonah:
I arrived here by way of your YouTube page.

I want to invite you to join TuDiabetes.com, a community for people touched by diabetes.

Hope to see you there!

Scott S said...

I'm curious whether you believe the iPort was worth the effort. After all, you had to deliver your insulin in the same spot repeatedly vs. rotating the site for an injection, there was slight discomfort, including with each injection? Just interesting in your perspective on this!